One sticky little foot, strange for its soft insistence, presses to Lan Zhan's cheek. Oh, there's the dodge, and while he transitions one long, lanky rear leg to Lan Zhan's ready knuckles, he does not yet relinquish his hold on his husband's hair.
"Would you?" And he pleads, knowing this is temporary, because he expects the answer as much as he expects the silence of winter snows and the fierceness of spring flooding: no. In his life and experience, very few things are unconditional.
More should be, but practical reality plays out otherwise. He is a man who appreciates ideals, but has become a realist finding his way back to enthusiasm for the betterment, the genuine justice, of a world where the weak should be defended, where might should not be the only right that wins, the only thing of worth.
Shifts his other long rear leg, then one foreleg, until he is hard nosing his husband's cheek in the last moment he has with it, all four feet collected, his belly against the valleys and peaks of Lan Zhan's knuckles.
"Nothing moves right," he says instead, "I can't turn my head, I don't have a neck, I see things wrong, it's worse than when I was the fox," and he says that like a curse. It'd been one, and far longer. He shudders, tiny body a leaf wracked by a storm of displeasure, and huddles smaller, pulls all limbs in. The small, grumpy figure of a toad ill at ease in his present circumstances. "I feel wrong. I'd like to forget this already, but I can't do that yet!"
A whine, and he knows it, but he doesn't check himself for it. If he cannot by now whine to Lan Zhan, then who can he? Jiang Cheng will probably listen. Wen Qing will listen and snort, empathetic but not indulgent. His late dual claimed son would... carry him around, he suspects, but he would not complain of this to Sizhui. One does not inflict that on children, in their twenties or otherwise.
"Everything is wrong. A skin that doesn't fit. How can I even talk? What a peculiar curse... ah, Lan Zhan, I can't access any of my own qi, I think everything's locked away with this forced change to form."
Like the fox, he doesn't say. Only then he'd had teeth and claws and limbs long and fleet enough to carry him swiftly. Now he has... toadiness.
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One sticky little foot, strange for its soft insistence, presses to Lan Zhan's cheek. Oh, there's the dodge, and while he transitions one long, lanky rear leg to Lan Zhan's ready knuckles, he does not yet relinquish his hold on his husband's hair.
"Would you?" And he pleads, knowing this is temporary, because he expects the answer as much as he expects the silence of winter snows and the fierceness of spring flooding: no. In his life and experience, very few things are unconditional.
More should be, but practical reality plays out otherwise. He is a man who appreciates ideals, but has become a realist finding his way back to enthusiasm for the betterment, the genuine justice, of a world where the weak should be defended, where might should not be the only right that wins, the only thing of worth.
Shifts his other long rear leg, then one foreleg, until he is hard nosing his husband's cheek in the last moment he has with it, all four feet collected, his belly against the valleys and peaks of Lan Zhan's knuckles.
"Nothing moves right," he says instead, "I can't turn my head, I don't have a neck, I see things wrong, it's worse than when I was the fox," and he says that like a curse. It'd been one, and far longer. He shudders, tiny body a leaf wracked by a storm of displeasure, and huddles smaller, pulls all limbs in. The small, grumpy figure of a toad ill at ease in his present circumstances. "I feel wrong. I'd like to forget this already, but I can't do that yet!"
A whine, and he knows it, but he doesn't check himself for it. If he cannot by now whine to Lan Zhan, then who can he? Jiang Cheng will probably listen. Wen Qing will listen and snort, empathetic but not indulgent. His late dual claimed son would... carry him around, he suspects, but he would not complain of this to Sizhui. One does not inflict that on children, in their twenties or otherwise.
"Everything is wrong. A skin that doesn't fit. How can I even talk? What a peculiar curse... ah, Lan Zhan, I can't access any of my own qi, I think everything's locked away with this forced change to form."
Like the fox, he doesn't say. Only then he'd had teeth and claws and limbs long and fleet enough to carry him swiftly. Now he has... toadiness.